Policy mobility and geopolitics: Circulating the Intercultural Cities Programme within and beyond Europe

This paper critically examines the development and circulation of the Intercultural Cities Programme (ICC) – a policy initiative launched by the Council of Europe (CoE) to manage cultural diversity in urban contexts. Since 2008, the ICC has expanded to more than 160 cities worldwide. This paper adopts a policy mobilities approach with a geopolitical lens to explore how the CoE’s, and more broadly, Europe’s political interests have shaped the ICC’s mobility. Taking history as an entry point, it contextualizes the ICC within Europe’s cultural policies that have served to reinforce its power and examines their legacies in the making of the ICC. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of the CoE’s documents, this paper presents two key findings. First, the development of the ICC is inseparable from the CoE’s normative power, which has strengthened its long-standing influence in diversity management. Second, the global circulation of the ICC is a product of the CoE’s strategies to reinforce its authority through links with cities. Insights developed in this paper suggest that policy mobility studies should expand their analytical and empirical scope to larger scales and actors to gain deeper understanding of how policy mobility is both constituted by, and constitutive of, geopolitical interests.